157 items tagged “css”
2020
CoronaFaceImpact (via) Variable fonts are fonts that can be customized by passing in additional parameters, which is done in CSS using the font-variation-settings property. Here’s a variable font that shows multiple effects of Covid-19 lockdown on a bearded face, created by Friedrich Althausen.
The Cleanest Trick for Autogrowing Textareas (via) This is a very clever trick. Textarea content is mirrored into a data attribute using a JavaScript one-liner, then a visibility: hidden ::after element clones that content using content: attr(data-replicated-value). The hidden element exists in a CSS grid with the textarea which allows the textarea to resize within the grid when the hidden element increases its height.
This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine. (via) I love it.
98.css (via) This is pretty beautiful: a CSS library that meticulously styles HTML form elements to look like the Windows 98 interface.
2019
How Do You Remove Unused CSS From a Site? (via) Chris Coyier takes an exhaustive look at the current set of tools for automatically removing unused CSS, and finds that there’s no magic bullet but you can get OK results if you use them carefully.
Everyone is angry about CSS again. I’m not even going to try to summarize the arguments. However it always seems to boil down to the fact that CSS is simultaneously too easy to bother with, yet so hard it needs to be wrapped up in a ball of JavaScript in case it scares the horses.
2018
The current linkedin.com homepage clocks in at 1.9MB of CSS (156KB compressed). After re-building a fully-functional version of the homepage with CSS Blocks, we were able to serve the same page with just 38KB of CSS. To be clear: that's the uncompressed size. After compression, that CSS file weighed in at less than 9KB!
Responsive Components: a Solution to the Container Queries Problem (via) Philip Walton uses Chrome’s new ResizeObserver API (best described as document.onresize for elements, currently a W3C Editor’s Draft, not yet supported by other browsers) to implement a media-query style mechanism for applying CSS based on the size of the parent container. This is really clever. In the absence of ResizeObserver (which can be polyfilled) it can fall back to showing the narrowest design, which is probably best for mobile anyway. Desktop browsers are better equipped to run the polyfill.
2017
Frontend in 2017: The important parts. Keeping track of developments in the frontend and JavaScript community is pretty much a full time job here days, so I found this summary of trends and developments over 2017 very useful for trying to catch up.
Datasette: Ability to customize presentation of specific columns in HTML view.
Still a work in progress, but Datasette master now allows you to inject links to one or more additional CSS and JavaScript resources (optionally with SRI hashes) which will be included on every page. Each template also
now provides CSS classes on the body element derived from the current database and table names to provide hooks for custom styling. Next up: custom template support.
CSS element() function (via) Vincent De Oliveira explores the CSS element function (2 years ago), which sadly is still only supported by Firefox. It lets you render any HTML element as a CSS background image, enabling folding effects, animated backgrounds, live previews and more.
What’s New In DevTools (Chrome 62). Some really neat stuff. Highlights include top-level “await” support in the console, the ability to take screenshots of specific HTML nodes, CSS grid highlighting and the ability to drop a .HAR file onto the network panel in order to view it as a waterfall.
2013
What are some ways that brought your proficiency of CSS to another level?
An exercise I found useful when I first learned CSS was to implement CSS versions of the designs of popular sites. This was back when most sites still used tables for layout.
[... 76 words]Wrapping block elements in anchor tags? I know this wasn’t valid markup in HTML4 but has this changed or is the only option through JS?
This is a new thing in HTML5: “Block-level” links in HTML5
[... 43 words]Is there an alternative to media queries for responsive design?
Yes: use percentage measurements for your layout components. That way you can build a website that works on a much larger range of screen sizes. You can combine this approach with media queries—for example, you could specify that your site has a 25% wide navigation menu and a 75% wide content area on devices that are wider than 400px, but any smaller than that and it collapses to a single column layout with the menu hidden and accessible only through a menu bar icon.
[... 102 words]2012
Why weren’t the features of Sass originally built into CSS?
This is not a straight-forward issue: CSS has a very long, complicated history. A good starting point for understanding the reluctance of the CSS working group to add variables/constants etc to CSS is this essay by Bert Bos of the W3C (entitled Why “variables” in CSS are harmful) http://www.w3.org/People/Bos/CSS...
[... 66 words]How do you know the real size of a web page?
The Google Chrome developer tools can do this, on the Network tab. Take a look at the bottom blue bar (which says “5 requests | 29.49KB transferred”)
[... 51 words]2011
Visualizing WebKit’s hardware acceleration. Command line flags for launching Safari (and the iOS simulator) in a way that highlights areas of the screen that are being hardware accelerated—particularly useful if you are using the “-webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0)” trick.
Qwery—The Tiny Selector Engine. A quarter of the size of Sizzle (1K gzipped and minified) due to only supporting ID, class and attribute selectors. Could be useful for things like embeddable widgets and badges, where depending on a larger library is impolite.
2010
Paper 5 | Scribd (via) A more impressive example of Scribd’s new HTML/CSS document viewer: a mathematics-heavy LaTeX paper by one of Scribd’s engineers.
Scribd in HTML5. Outstanding piece of engineering work from Scribd—they can now render documents using HTML, webfonts and a ton of CSS absolute positioning (using ems rather than pixels) instead of Flash. Nothing to do with HTML5 of course, which is rapidly replacing Ajax as the most mis-applied terminology on the Web. That nit-pick feels pretty insignificant compared to their overall achievement though—being able to convert any formatted document (.doc, pdf etc) in to HTML and CSS that displays correctly is a real leap forward.
Pure CSS3 Spiderman Cartoon w/ jQuery and HTML5. Great demo, though calling -webkit-animation HTML5 (or even CSS3) is a bit of a stretch...
Plugging the CSS History Leak (via) Firefox is fixing the nefarious CSS visited link colour history leak flaw, which currently affects all browsers and allows a malicious site to determine if you have visited a specific site by checking getComputedStyle against a link to that page. It’s an obtrusive but necessary fix—visited link styles will be restricted to colour and border styles (no background images and hence no more checkbox effects since the image request could leak information) and those colours will not be reported via getComputedStyle. I hope other browser vendors follow suit.
2009
Going Nuts with CSS Transitions. Nat’s article for this year’s 24ways—adding special effects to images using CSS rotation, box shadows and the magical -webkit-transition property.
jQSlickWrap. Clever jQuery plugin which allows text to wrap around irregularly shaped images, by processing the image with canvas and rewriting it as a sequence of floated horizontal bars of different widths. It’s a a modern variant of the the ragged float trick first introduced by Eric Meyer.
How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools. This is the trick I’ve been using to generate choropleths at the Guardian for the past year: figure out the preferred colours for a set of data in a Python script and then rewrite an SVG file to colour in the areas. I use ElementTree rather than BeautifulSoup but the technique is exactly the same. The best thing about SVG is that our graphics department can export them directly out of Illustrator, with named layers and paths automatically becoming SVG ID attributes. Bonus tip: sometimes you don’t have to rewrite the SVG XML at all, instead you can generate CSS to colour areas by ID selector and inject it in to the top of the file.
It’s interesting to me how much [Closure] feels like a more advanced version of Dojo in many ways. There's a familiar package system, the widgets are significantly more mature, and Julie and Ojan's Editor component rocks. The APIs will feel familiar (if verbose) to Dojo users, the class hierarchies seem natural, and Closure even uses Acme, the Dojo CSS selector engine.
CSS 3: Progress! Alex Russell on the new exciting stuff going in to CSS 3 based on real-world implementations in the modern set of browsers. Of particular interest is the new Flexible Box specification, which specifies new layout primitives hbox and vbox (as seen in XUL) and is already supported by both WebKit and Gecko.
Modernizr (via) Neat idea and an unobtrusive implementation: a JavaScript library that runs feature tests for various HTML5 features (canvas, box shadow, CSS transforms and so on) and adds classes to the HTML body element, allowing you to write CSS selectors that only apply if a feature is present. Detected features are exposed to JavaScript as boolean properties, e.g. Modernizer.multiplebgs.
To Sprite Or Not To Sprite. CSS sprite images are decompressed to full bitmaps by browsers before they are rendered, so sprite files with large numbers of pixels will dramatically increase the memory footprint of your site.